Interesting article on problem complexity and how the human brain tries to cope with it — and, eventually, when it cannot.
According to University of Queensland cognitive science researchers Graeme S. Halford, Rosemary Baker, Julie E. McCredden and John D. Bain of Griffith University, the number of individual variables we can mentally handle while trying to solve a problem (like baking a lemon meringue pie) is relatively small: Four variables are difficult; five are nearly impossible.
To keep test subjects from breaking down problems into bite-size chunks, researchers needed to create problems that they weren’t familiar with. In their experiment, 30 academics were presented with incomplete verbal descriptions of statistical interactions between fictitious variables, with an accompanying set of graphs that represented the interactions. The interactions varied in complexity — involving as few as two variables up to as many as five. The participants were timed as they attempted to complete the given sentences to correctly describe the interactions the graphs were showing. After each problem, they also indicated how confident they were of their solutions.
The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.
After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, “I kept losing information,” and “I just lost track.”
The results may have application in jobs where folks are expected to simultaneously juggle multiple variables, such as air traffic control.
(via BoingBoing)
This may also have applications in gaming. Say you’re a scrapper in City of Heroes and you’re in a group. You’re tracking the health of the guy you’re fighting, keeping an eye on when he’ll run. You’re watching your health, seeing when you might need to pop an inspiration. You’re checking your action bar, seeing when your best attacks recharge. Oh, that guy just raced toward the controller – he must have drawn aggro. Wait, is that a Fifth Column ambush heading our way?
And everybody wakes up in the hospital.
So you start simplifying. You just hit the big attack button every so often – just in case – without bothering to look to see if it’s recharged. You let the empathy defender worry about your health bar. But of course, some things you decide not to focus on might become things that others need to focus on, and now that person hits the ‘magic 5’ and again, everybody wakes up in the hospital.
I’m tempted to spit out some top-of-my-head law like ‘a well formed group assigns no more than three tasks to each of its members’, but really it’s going to take more experimentation to see if this is how things actually work.
That’s actually a good point. Two to three basic tasks is probably pretty close to ideal for someone in a melee, leaving a bit of spare processing for contingencies (“Where did HE come from? EEP!”), sounds like a good tactic.
It also has some effect on, say, distractions during driving. Normal traffic, decent weather, it’s relatively simple. Having to watch for street signs, deal with a phone conversation, make a phone call, *and* figure out traffic … analysis and decision start to get sucky.